If there’s one very valuable thing I can tell younger people it’s this one sentence, “The collapse never comes”. Ever since I’ve been young I’ve been hearing a million doom stories every year, “A massive global economic collapse is coming!” “The dollar is set to lose its reserve currency status! Buy Gold!” “A massive killer pandemic will come and bring down global society!” Even when variants of these things appeared, the system just kept on going, and in the long run got stronger after every shock. Modern Globalized capitalism is an animal that refuses to die. In your life, it’s extremely unlikely that this global system is going to break down, so just live your life trying to see where you can take advantage of it, instead of being a nonstop doomer thinking it’s going to disappear.

I hate to break it to you - but the United States is an absolute, incoherent shitshow. The idea that we have ‘representative government’ is ridiculous. If that were true we would not have wasted billions killing Iranians for no reason at all. Some people wanted this - but the voters who elected this government did not. Let’s go further. When Trump goes to China - he brings our ‘great billionaires’ with him. I can’t think of any more obvious symbol that we live in an oligarchy that does everything it can to manipulate outcomes - and that voting is a bit of a joke. It’s like he’s bringing with him ‘the ruling elite.’ Because that is what he did. We have at least 40 million illegal aliens living here. Our business ‘leaders’ engineered this by bribing politicians to keep the border open - because they wanted to pay low wages and make mucho $$ for themselves. When people objected because their incomes were falling - the business leaders accused them of racism and funded Barack Obama to become POTUS. The USA is $40 trillion in debt - and no one has a plan to solve that problem. Absolutely no one. This will blow up one day - and it will destroy normal people who save in dollars - because the unspoken plan is to destroy the currency and save the rich and destroy the rest. But people who own our homes - like Blackstone or Blackrock - won’t care because their assets will follow inflation. Everyone else will be reduced to paupers renting from them - their bank accounts gone. The United States today is hopelessly dysfunctional. It lacks a coherent population that can even agree on anything. It is bankrupt - but the rest of the world is propping it up because they are also scared of what happens when the dollar collapses. It doesn’t have any smart leaders - and we have to watch insiders doing oil trades to make $$ on the Iran war - and the administration itself sells shit coins. Our foreign policy is a total joke - not strategic in any way at all. It is driven by special interests, and then not even followed through. And people are actuality making money on it - pump and dump coming straight from the White House. This is a hell of a way to celebrate 250 Years! At least we can have a cage match on the White House lawn that degrades our entire history and underscores just how bad and ridiculous things are! Thank you for your attention to this matter! Enjoy the circus! If you’re lucky you will be dead when the music stops!

"Chinese open source models are about to fall badly behind as Mythos level models employ anti-distillation." This will age very poorly Distillation has stopped being a capability driver for GLM, Deepseek, Moonshot U can try v4, K2.7 & GLM 5.2 to test this

Maybe the Fable 5 ban will be resolved and it's all a big misunderstanding, but "assume people will always disappoint you" has been a useful heuristic since 2020. If the US maintains the export control ban on Fable/Mythos, it will likely extend it to any other frontier labs that develop similar models (OpenAI basically). If this happens, Chinese labs are absolutely guaranteed to exceed US labs before the end of the year. The differential factor in this outcome is that the Chinese government is more competent, especially on technical issues, so their models will still be open-source after they use them to plug all their cybersecurity holes. Essentially, they will execute their version of Project Glasswing faster and more successfully. Today has certainly been an exciting day.

It will be the greatest day ever for Citizenship Sales/Residency program Twitter if Paraguay somehow wins tonight. I barely knew anything about Paraguay before they relentlessly promoted Asunción everyday.

Nobody goes to America and thinks: "Wow, it's so rich here!" I knew a dude from business school who was a big America fan and his dream was to work for Goldman Sachs in NYC. After he actually arrived in NYC, he was very disappointed because it's way more ghetto than he imagined. America HAS a lot of wealth, but it's in datacenters, fighter jets and shit. It's not like you gonna land and Elon comes out with a gold plated Megazord to greet you. Actual gold digger favourites are Saint Tropez, Monaco, Dubai, certain districts in Paris, Shanghai, HK.

The elites are a reflection of the people. It doesn’t matter which way it flows either. If the people are trash, the elites are going to be trash; if the elites are trash, then the values they are going to impose on their people will be just as bad.

Five of these are not like the others: The graduating classes at Stuyvesant and BronxSci are ~850 and ~780, respectively. Each the same size or larger than the entire "NYC (Private Schools)" combined senior graduating class (~800). Yes, the public magnet schools are large feeders into the "Ivies Plus" but that is in large part a function of their large absolute size. In % terms, they are much lower (~18% at Stuyvesant's graduating class is going to "Ivies Plus", ~11% if you exclude Cornell where it apparently has a special relationship). The comparable number for those NYC private schools is from 20 to 35%. The apples-to-apples number for my relatively unknown suburban NJ public high school was ~6% in the late 90s. It was a very good high school, I've written about how challenging it was to compete on grades with the kids of Bell Labs scientists and engineers working out of the Basking Ridge office. But it was still an order-of-magnitude easier to finish in the Top 10% at that school than a school like Stuyvesant or TJHSST. I advised my eldest that attending one of the NYC specialized high schools would make it harder to get into one of these schools vs. other options (she decided to go for it anyway!).

The US is a Pacific Ocean and Western Hemisphere country Will be much more obvious as the 21st century goes on The European orientation was temporary

Over the next decade Hong Kong is hard at work at developing the Northern Metropolis plan, which will redevelop the areas of Hong Kong that directly border Shenzhen. The goal is clear, by the 2040s China envisions Shenzhen - Hong Kong becoming one fully contiguous and merged city. Combined, the Chinese Government HK's local government is spending 46 billion dollars on new developments in the area over the next half decafe, and they expect 2.5 million people will eventually live in this area by 2040. The direction is clear, Hong Kong is going to become far more like Shenzhen. The GBA Century.

What makes it even worse for Thailand is that unlike South Korea and Japan where low fertility did become an obsession to the governments in particular, and did lead to some policy responses, Thailand’s national government barely mentions this issue, and they don’t seem to be treating it as a national emergency regardless. This could change in the next few years but it is actually quite bizarre how little they discuss it. Thai political elites leave a lot to be desired in contrast to their neighbors in Vietnam, Malaysia, and Singapore.

Xi has rarely traveled in the past two years, for him to undertake a personal trip to Pyongyang is really a strong credit to Kim Jong Un, it is a sign of massive respect for the de facto Chinese Emperor to do this. He is diplomatically stronger than any North Korean statesman in living memory, His armed forces pivot to Russia has ensured that China also needs to more strongly compete for his continued patronage as well.